SALEM - Employees are not covered by a concealed weapons permit exemption for business owners, the Oregon Supreme Court has ruled.

The court on Thursday upheld the 1998 conviction of a Portland convenience-store clerk, Morgan Joel Perry, for unlawful possession of a concealed weapon.

Perry had claimed that an exemption in state law covered employees and owners who keep firearms at a place of business from having to obtain permits. He also argued that his conviction violated his rights to bear firearms under state and federal constitutions.

Lawyers for the National Rifle Association filed an argument in support of Perry. But the justices upheld the conviction, based on their reading of a 1925 law that exempts people from having to obtain permits for firearms kept at home or a place of business.

Extending the "place of business" exception to employees would defeat the Legislature's intent "by allowing any person with a job to carry a concealed weapon on the job without a license," Justice Thomas Balmer wrote in a unanimous opinion.

The original law, passed in 1917, barred anyone other than police officers from carrying concealed firearms. The Legislature later changed the law to allow people to obtain permits, and it approved major changes in 1989 that set uniform standards to obtain those permits from county sheriffs.

Leland Berger, a Portland lawyer who represented Perry, said the ruling "seems to invite a constitutional challenge to the entire system of concealed-weapons permits."

But the court had rejected that argument when it agreed with an earlier Court of Appeals ruling that the ban on possession of concealed firearms without permits is constitutional even if an exception is allowed for business owners.